Remember this? The city employees and directors working hard to not only close a public residential street but also working OT to make sure a private business owner got the property (valued at close to $1 million) for FREE. The dealership offered to pay nothing for the street vacation. But hey, how many jobs were created? How many people stayed out of jail? How much did this save our justice system? Not sure, but they did get to build a gigantic parking lot. When the mayor’s administration wants to throw a hissy fit over giving away a rust bucket of a building, I only have to show them this fiasco, and then ask them to STFU.
Cory beat me to this post (thank you). I figured he would do a much better job of analyzing the situation;
As a primary solution, ARI advocates coordination among all actors in affordable housing: the city, state, non-profits, and developers.
But remember: collectivism is a response to market failure. Even amidst 2.3% unemployment, Sioux Falls employers are failing to provide their scarce workers with the wages they need to support the renovation and construction of decent cheap houses. Since our captains of industry and bumper-car owners are being stingy, we have to run around drawing cooperation lines on concept maps and pouring tax incentives and federal grants into housing efforts.
Ironically I had this conversation Saturday with Mayoral hopeful Nick Weiland. I told him that the city needs to have less focus on annexation and urban sprawl and a push for fixing up our core, central and proper areas of Sioux Falls, which basically is 41st street to Russell and Kiwanis to Cleveland Ave (my educated guess). I’m not just talking sewer/water, roads and curb and gutter, I’m talking properties. This area of town has some of the most affordable housing in our city, unfortunately many of these single family homes and four-plex apartments also need some TLC. But they are perfect for affordable housing. The solution I have offered for several years is to change our TIF program to include landlords and single family homeowners willing to invest in these core houses and apartments and have any other loose ends tied up with low interest or no interest loans from community development or other state and federal programs. If we can give TIFs to luxury condos (Washington Square) we can certainly turn the program over to people willing to help out with our affordable housing glut.
The other issue is that housing costs are not in line with wages in Sioux Falls, and the regressive sales tax system is not helping matters.
At the end of the day, while a study like this is comprehensive and needed, it didn’t tell us anything new. It takes more then a report to change things, it takes a big boot up the asses of our local and state lawmakers to change the rules of tax incentives to get the ball rolling on this.
Is this a misunderstanding, a good project gone bad or just plainly a mistake? Grant Street is one of those forgotten pieces and places of Sioux Falls. A neighborhood without the promised neighbors, a mud road instead of the promised paved street all courtesy of poor planning on the part of the city of Sioux Falls.
Grant Street is a forgotten place in need of our help. It should not be an industrial park because of a flying fickled finger of fate put it in a battle to be livable. On January 3, 2017 the Grant Street neighbors banded together to fight a development of storage units instead of the once promised twin homes with a city street.
Fix the street, fix the neighborhood and make it something any of us would be willing to live in. The city of Sioux Falls allowed this problem to exist, now solve it.
While the mayor was touting building a $25 million dollar building downtown today (that we don’t need) over on Phillips Avenue they were trying to prop up PAVE. Of course the OSHA findings could take months and there could be a lot of closed door settlements with insurance companies.
But this question was posed to me today; is Hultgren Construction still around? I guess I am not sure, but the word coming back to me is that many of the projects they were working on around town have halted. Is it a precautionary measure to freeze their assets or to liquidate them?
Funny how when this all happened every TV station in town sprouted an investigative reporter as if a college professor was getting arrested for sexual assault. Now we hear NO followup with the building collapse. Maybe they found another mysterious white truck driving through Platte, SD in the middle of the night?
I’m just putting it out there, is it fair to compare the two buildings in cost and size and what would be accomplished?
Washington Square with a price-tag of $28 million;
Washington Square will feature 22 luxury condos, 7-thousand square feet of retail space, 22-thousand square feet of office space and nearly 200 additional public parking spots.
The city administration building is $25 million;
The city this week unveiled details surrounding a proposed 79,000-square-foot city administration building in downtown Sioux Falls that would include three stories and a basement level featuring 34 underground parking spaces.
I guess if I was comparing apples to apples, Washington Square is getting more bang for the buck.